Collected Sunsets
He was one of them. Shirt damp by eight in the morning, shoes dusty by nine, soul somewhere on the line between Sudirman and his dreams, which did not have a station yet. Jakarta in those years was a city you wore rather than lived in: ojek fumes, the metallic breath of train doors, tobacco smoke at the platform edge, seven million people practicing patience at once. He worked in accounts receivable, which he described, when pressed, as the department of waiting politely. The trains taught the same skill at a steeper price.
He owned one good notebook, and he wasted it, his colleagues agreed, on the least useful data in the city. Sunsets. Numbered, dated, described in ten words or fewer. No. 87: orange over Semanggi, wires like sheet music. No. 214: smog gold, the whole flyover embarrassed by it.
It was not beautiful in the usual sense, the light he collected. It came through pollution and tangled cables, over towers that had been promised to be finished years ago. Postcards would have rejected every one of them. He wrote them down anyway, every evening, on trains too crowded to raise both elbows. He had learned to write with the notebook pressed against his own chest, like a man taking his pulse. His colleagues teased him kindly, the way you tease a man you suspect of having something you lost.
A collection needs rules, or it is only hoarding, and he had three. No photographs: the camera flattens what the eye forgave. Ten words or fewer: a sunset does not explain itself, so the entry should not either. And the commute only. Sunsets on holidays did not count; anyone can be moved on a beach. The whole point, he said once, at a wedding, after two glasses, was that the sky did this every single evening above people who had stopped billing it. His collection was not of skies. It was of evenings he had refused to waste.
Then one evening in the wet season, the train stalled on the elevated stretch, the full length of a golden hour, and the carriage did what carriages do: groaned, checked its phones, calculated its lateness. He was wedged by the west window with his notebook out, and what was happening over the city was, by his accounting, already in the top five of the year and still improving. So he said it out loud, to no one and everyone, the sentence that would follow him the rest of his life: this one is the best one this year. But to understand what that meant, you have to know what a full page of the notebook looked like. Three evenings, say. Any three.
A few heads lifted, out of politeness. Then a few more, out of curiosity. Then the phones came down, one by one, like a flock landing, and for two entire minutes a packed Jakarta commuter train in rush hour stood silent and watched the sky bleed orange behind the towers and the tangled wires. Strangers exchanged the small guilty smiles of people caught being human. Somewhere in the next carriage a baby stopped crying, unrelated, but nobody believed that.
The train lurched on. The doors opened at the next station and released everyone back into their lives, slightly late and slightly changed. He wrote it down with the pen shaking a little. No. 1,214: the whole train looked up.
After that evening, the teasing changed direction. Colleagues began reporting sunsets to him, shyly, like witnesses. There was a good one Thursday, did you get it. He always had. The department of waiting politely developed, over a year, the habit of drifting toward the west windows at six, and the manager, who had opinions about productivity, was seen there himself on a Friday in the dry season, saying nothing, billing nobody. The notebook, by then, had a waiting list of borrowers, and came back each time smelling faintly of someone else's commute.
He never left Jakarta, which everyone had assumed was the dream. The dream turned out to be the notebook. Years later he learned to build the evenings some other way: orange and apricot catching in the air, tobacco soft as platform smoke, patchouli and tonka warm as a crowded bus at twilight, and underneath it, faithfully, a whisper of the city's grit, kept in on purpose, because leaving it out would have been a lie. For every worker who has ever dreamed on a train. This one was his. Maybe it is yours too.
Escape is one answer.
Attention is the better one.
The strange beauty of a life is found when you stop waiting to leave it. Look up often enough, and even the smog turns gold.